Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Colorado is beautiful. My husband is beautiful. Our love is beautiful. This blog post our wedding photographer wrote is beautiful. You know what’s NOT beautiful? The fact that my husband just got sent on a deployment until election day. So I’m not going to talk about that. I’m going to talk about something that makes me happy instead. Hooray happiness!Television makes me happy. It really does. People rail on and on about how evil television is. They call it “the dumb box”...it sucks out your brain and makes you and your children and the old lady down the street turn into useless zombies. This can be TOTALLY true. “Teen Mom” totally turns me into a zombie. The other day I was making dinner and I ended up sitting on the edge of the coffee table for 20 minutes with a spatula held upright in my hand watching the trials and tribulations of our dear friends Farrah, Macy, Catelynn and Amber. So yeah...TV can definitely be zombie inducing. On the other hand, I think it is INCREDIBLE that we live in a time where theatre...where ART can meet us in our living rooms. There is a lot of crap out there. But there is also a lot of great, quality, didactic programming as well. And all we have to do to access it is pick up a remote. FANTASTIC. The boy and I (as I mentioned before) have been watching our way through X-Files. We felt we really couldn’t qualify ourselves as “nerds” if we had never watched it. I mean really. Who did we think we were?Going into it, this is what I knew about the X-Files: Scully and Mulder are some kind of government agents who look for aliens while fighting their growing sexual tensions and massive government conspiracies. The end. Now, as we approach the end of the 6th season, this is what I know about the X-Files: Scully and Mulder are FBI agents who look for aliens while fighting their growing sexual tensions and massive government conspiracies. Really. That’s the X-Files in a nutshell.

There are things I definitely like about it. There are also things that I really can’t stand. And other things that bugged me at first that I’ve since gotten over. I feel like I really really really would have enjoyed it had I been old enough to watch it when it first came out. The X-Files is one of the shows credited with inventing the modern “story arc” television series. Before the X-Files, most shows were incredibly episodic with no theme tying everything together. The problem as a modern viewer, however, is that we are really used to story arcs. Really tight story arcs, ones that the producers and writers have had planned out since the beginning. Comparing the X-Files to shows by Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams is like comparing “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “Avatar”. Yeah, they’re the same genre...but there have been so many advances in technology and story telling techniques in between them that the first, to someone who didn’t see it when it came out, is almost laughable. X-Files can be frustratingly repetitive, the characters have a tendency to grow or learn in one episode then revert to old ways by the next episode. I mean really....how much does Scully have to see before she starts believing? Really?Speaking of Scully, this show screams of early 90s sexism. Maybe because my mother is so strong and independent, maybe because I had other strong females in my life, I never realized I grew up in such a sexist time period. Scully is the only woman in the first several seasons who is not portrayed as a victim or someone’s mother. She is constantly landing herself in the hospital. Mulder is hardly EVER the victim, he’s too busy saving Scully. It drives me crazy. There are things I do like. I like how ridiculous it can sometimes be, it reminds me a little of Dr. Who. I like the three nerds that help them out, they call themselves “The Lone Gunmen” and it turns out they had a spin-off series at some point. We are totally going to look for that. I like that it’s all about conspiracies and the possibility that the good guys are sometimes the bad guys...and sometimes people are both. We’ll see how I like the final three seasons and movie (and then I can check off one of the things on my 30 before 30, woot). Honestly, I just want to get this over with so we can start back up on Star Trek.